Tikehau Map

Tikehau lies in the northwest corner of the Tuamotu Archipelago, about two hundred miles northeast of Tahiti and just west of Rangiroa, one of the largest atolls in the world. The Tuamotus hold nearly eighty atolls scattered across an expanse of ocean the size of Western Europe, and Tikehau is one of the smaller ones: a nearly round lagoon about sixteen miles across, enclosed by a thin necklace of coral. Like every atoll, it is the ghost of a volcano. The island that once stood here sank slowly back into the Pacific over millions of years, while the reef that fringed its shores kept growing upward toward the light. The volcano is gone. The reef is what remains.

That reef is broken into dozens of motus, low islets of coral sand and rubble topped with coconut palms, pandanus and scrubby beach vegetation. Most of the atoll’s few hundred residents live in Tuherahera, the village on the southwestern rim, where the airstrip sits on a motu barely wide enough to hold it. East of the village, the beaches known as Les Sables Roses glow pink from crushed coral and shell. Out in the lagoon, Motu Puarua, the island of birds, is a nesting colony for noddies, terns and boobies. Between the motus, shallow channels called hoa let the ocean spill into the lagoon on every swell, and at low tide you can wade across some of them from one islet to the next.

Only one of those gaps is deep enough for a boat. Tuheiava Pass, on the western side of the atoll, is Tikehau’s single true opening to the open sea, and it is the atoll’s heartbeat. Twice a day the tide pours through it, flushing the lagoon and carrying plankton in and out. The current draws in grey reef sharks, manta rays, barracuda and dense schools of snapper and jacks. Jacques Cousteau’s research team once reported that Tikehau’s lagoon held one of the richest concentrations of fish in the Tuamotus. When I snorkeled there, I believed it. You can read more in my story on Tikehau.